


Crossings

by Nastrandir



Category: Jade Empire
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Introspection, lots of yearning, mainly angst though, somewhat bittersweet ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:02:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28885071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nastrandir/pseuds/Nastrandir
Summary: Paths cross and cross again, and Jen Zi wonders about Sagacious Zu and his reasons for staying.
Relationships: Radiant Jen Zi/Sagacious Zu
Kudos: 1





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> This is a terribly self-indulgent wander into a tragic story with a lot of unspoken bittersweet yearning for which I blame Jade Empire entirely. Please heed the archive warning for this one of course. 
> 
> This is also posted by me at ff.net, under the same user name.
> 
> Thanks for reading :)

The trees swayed, green and rippling between the swathe of the sky. She knelt on the slight dip of the rock where the path curled around above the stream, her eyes on the glassy movement of the water. She could feel the ache of the day under her skin, the way they had marched doggedly through the forest, to the temple and to the inn and back, and beneath, to the echoing caves with their swarming monsters. 

_And the wrenching moment when she had stepped through the portal, stepped through and into another realm, the sudden burst of sunlight bright enough almost to hurt._

She dipped her hands into the stream until the water rushed into her palms and tried to calm the roil of her thoughts. It had happened so _fast_ , she thought, the sunlight thicker and warmer and the trees rustling as they should. She remembered the deadened quiet of the forest two, three days ago, when they had first ventured up the stone steps and into the stagnant trees. Branches and leaves and boughs, all of them rotting from the soil up, from the monster and its children that lived beneath the earth. 

Still, she thought, they had a windmap now, and a flyer, and a dam to open and then they could be _gone_ , moving away from this tiny town and the water that lapped incessantly at its docks. They could be gone and away, and perhaps she could pry her way a little further into the secrets that had knotted themselves around her. 

_Her past and her thoughts and Master Li, and the woman in blue who spoke as if over a vast distance and through some great pain, and the weight of the amulet at her throat._

_T_ _he village, burned._

She turned her hands over in the water, and over again, until the thoughts were banished and her head was full of nothing but the slow thump of her own pulse. She followed the narrow path down through the forest, bracketed on both sides by the tall, spearing trees. She discovered the town nearly silent, and by the time she had picked her way past the merchant stalls and around the side of the teahouse she was almost glad when she heard their voices, Dawn Star laughing at something, and then again, over Whirlwind’s indignant retort. 

She crossed the last stretch of the path and ducked into the shade of the courtyard. Almost immediately Dawn Star asked, “The forest?”

“As empty as we left it,” she answered lightly. 

“Good.” 

"I saw Lord Yun this morning. He and his hunters will stay, he’s said.”

Dawn Star nodded. “That is best for the forest, I think.” She smiled and added, “Are you hungry?”

“Starving. Are you cooking?”

“You’re helping,” Dawn Star told her mildly. 

“I’m honoured.” 

Later the night came down. She tried to sleep, wrapped in blankets and aware of the flicker of the fire, until she drifted into the strangeness greyness of her dreams. Too soon, she jolted awake, to the ashes of the fire and the cold of a morning that was not quite yet properly light. She straightened her clothes and fumbled her boots on before she clambered upright and made her way out into the crisp chill of courtyard again. 

Her gaze found Zu first, where he sat against the far wall. “Do you ever sleep?”

His head turned. “I had last watch.”

Mechanically, she rummaged for the pot and one of the flasks. At the firepit, the metal and the flint jumped for too long between her hands until the spark caught. 

“You have a plan for today?” he asked, his voice jarring her out of reverie. 

“Yes. I thought I’d walk down to the dam, and ask however many dozens of Lotus Assassins there are down there to politely go away and or else help me let the river in again.”

One side of his mouth shifted. “Not the best plan you’ve ever had.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to go down to the dam and fight some assassins.”

“Yes.”

“And then we can leave,” she said, the honesty suddenly simmering up, the impatience, the _want_ to be moving on and away. "I feel so --- _stagnant_ here sometimes."

“We have no way of knowing what we will find in the Imperial City.”

“Better than sitting here wondering.” She pushed her knuckles against her eyes. “Will you,” she said, and the words caught in her throat. It was absurd, she knew – it was a fight, just another fight, another encounter, but _they knew_ there would be assassins at the dam, and she knew how they lingered heavy in his thoughts. 

“Yes,” Zu said, too quickly. “I will be there.”

“Thank you.” 

“No need.” 

She nodded, and her gaze dropped to the flames, bright and new where they curled up around the pot. The heat touched her hands first, and then her face, and unbidden she thought of the village – _home, and it had always been home, and too often she dreamed of it_ – as she had left it.

_The air was on fire, the heat of it filling her mouth and her nose. She ran, aware of Dawn Star beside her, aware of the way she was breathing, uneven and halfway to sobbing. How they were both breathing, or trying to breathe, as they shouldered their way through the coiling smoke._ _They found the houses and the practice yard, the ground hot underfoot and the walls wreathed in flame. There were others there, assassins, soldiers in gleaming armour, and somehow she marshaled herself and threw herself at them. Blindly she fought, the flat of her sword smacking hard against muscle and armour as often as the edge. The smoke and the searing heat ruined her balance and her breathing, and when she tried to swallow, it was painful._

_Afterwards, she heard Dawn Star, her voice quiet and heavy with weeping as she tried to talk, tried to make some sense of it, of the chaos of it. She felt someone’s hand on her arm and shoved away._

_“No,” Zu said. “Drink. You must.”_

_“No, I,” she managed._

_He caught her hand, guided her to a flask, wrapped her fingers around it. Her eyes were streaming, with tears or the smoke or both. She drank, swallowing the water down in drowning gulps. She tried to pass it back to him, but he shook his head, and made her drink again, the relentless pressure of his fingers on hers punishing._

  
  


X

Two days later she woke early again, and took herself out to where the flyer sat, the sprawl of its huge wings and legs vast and gleaming. She meandered around it twice, dragging her fingertips against the cool glass curve that encased its head. She heard footsteps behind – deliberately loud, heels scraping against the ground – and turned in time to see Zu as he approached, his staff propped against one wiry shoulder. 

“You think it’ll get us there?” she asked almost absently. 

“It will have to,” he said, his gaze following hers, up to the shining arches and stiff spans of the flyer’s wings. 

“You’re so reassuring,” she told him drily. She remembered the roar and rush of water at the dam, and the assassins, and the way Inquisitor Lim had stared at them – stared at Zu, she thought, pinned him with raking eyes as if he could carve his way to the why of it, the truth of it, whatever it had been that had sent a Lotus Assassin into traitorous isolation. 

“Have you,” Zu said, and coughed. “These visions, I mean.”

“You believe me now, do you?” 

“I believe _you_ believe,” he said, his voice lightening slightly. 

She threw him a glare, mostly insincere, and turned away from the flyer. She dropped cross-legged into the grass and sat, her hands cupped over her knees. “I do believe it,” she said. Her fingers drifted to the amulet chain, cold where it lay against her neck. “Well,” she amended. “Either that or I’m going mad.”

He smiled, slightly, a tiny movement. “It’s possible.” 

“Thank you so much.”

“It’s also possible that you’re right.”

“I’m honoured.” 

“That I think you might be right?”

“That you think I might not be mad.” She dug her fingers under the chain and tugged the amulet up and into her hands. Too unwieldy to be delicate, the design too unsettling to be beautiful, the metal too cold to ignore, to forget that it lay there, always there, near her heart. She turned it, the gems blinking. “I have to believe that it is as the Forest Spirit said. That she is the Water Dragon, and that I have to help her.” She frowned. “As much as a mortal might think to help such a being. Do you know what the strange part is?”

“I’d been under the impression that there were several strange parts. The demon under the caves, the way we seem to walk between worlds too easily, the fact that for some reason your allies have not resorted to fighting each other yet. Your visions might come a poor last.” 

Suspiciously, she peered up at him. “You’re laughing at me.”

“Not at all.” He sat opposite her, the sharp lines of his shoulders cutting the early sunlight. His gaze found hers, dark and thoughtful. “So what is the strange part?”

“I was turning it over and over in my head. Whether I’d dreamed her up. Whether I imagined what happened in the Spirit Cave. Whether if I dream her now, asleep, it’s part of my imagination, or not.” Ruefully she added, “That it took a fox spirit to give her a title.” 

“The world is a strange place,” Zu said, his voice softening. “You fight demons. Your friend senses ghosts before anyone else sees them.”

“It changed so fast. I walked into that cave expecting a challenge.” Unbidden, she found herself smiling. “I suppose I certainly found one.” 

“What else has she said?”

“She speaks strangely,” she admitted. “She speaks in words that turn in on themselves. That I am to learn, but not too much. That I am meant to see, but not too clearly. That I am to succeed, but not entirely. Whatever path it is that I walk, I am directed.” 

“By her?” 

“I don’t know.” She stared at her hands, and then across at his, broad palms and tapered fingers quarried deep with scars. 

“What else is troubling you?”

“The weather,” she retorted, and wondered how it was that he read her so easily, so quickly, so correctly. “She looks,” she said, and struggled with the words, the words to explain the hollow ache she had seen in the woman’s eyes, how she had heard it in the woman’s voice, the words fragile and raw, as if they came from so far away, at a great cost. “She looks sad. It sounds trite. I know.” 

Zu’s head tilted, his gaze sharpening. Footsteps intruded, and then Kang’s voice and Dawn Star’s after him, both of them calling out about the flyer, and the bright clarity of the morning. 

She uncoiled upright, smiling when Dawn Star caught her arm. “You’re ready?”

“I think so,” Dawn Star answered. “She’ll fly us there.”

“It’s a she?”

“Now you’re arguing for the sake of it,” Dawn Star said mildly. “But yes. She is.”

They hauled their belongings on quickly, weapons and Dawn Star’s rolled-up parchments and the two clothes chests they were sharing and the food supplies that Hou eyed shrewdly and flasks and the fragments of machines and wheels and cogs that Kang insisted must come with them. She followed them up into the flyer, feeling the rumble of it beneath her boots, the thrum of it as Kang woke it. 

The ground dropped away, the flyer climbing and climbing, its huge heavy wings fighting the air. Below she could see the wet gleam of water, the river where it met the glitter of the sea. Mountains behind, jagging up into the sky, sawtoothed and wrapped in cloud. Briefly she watched Kang, his hands firm and certain on levers and switches and handles as he coaxed the flyer faster, dizzyingly higher, until the air was frosty against her mouth. She turned, flattening her hands against the curve of the glass and just _looking_ , staring down as the land unraveled beneath. Staring at the faint patch of her own breath. At the stomach-dropping emptiness beneath the flyer. At the details she thought she could find, the small rises of hills and the terraced stacks of paddy-fields and the haze of dust above the twisting serpent-shape of a road. 

A shadow slanted across the glass, and she saw Zu as he stood beside her. She opened her mouth to say something, realised the clamour of the wings and the clatter of the curled-up legs were too loud, and smiled instead. For a long moment he regarded her, his expression softening slightly. He tilted his head towards the glass, and she nodded back at him, aware of the absurdity of it – _mimicking at each other, she thought, exaggerating_ – and when she turned back to look again, he stayed beside her, his hands level with hers where they were spread against the glass. Lean with muscle and rough with scars at the wrists and above and below, and she wrenched her gaze away and back to the glass, and the world as it unrolled beneath. 

X

The Imperial City was a riot of lanternlight and people as they walked, and the slopes of the streets as they curled and curved. The day sank away into dusk, and after she had wrangled with an innkeeper for a handful of rooms on the same corridor, she found her way back outside, raucous still with the noise of carts and raised voices and the din of footsteps just beyond the inn. Warmer here, she thought, the press of the heat from the air itself as much from the lanterns and the braziers and the throng as they wove their way through the avenues. 

“This is it,” Zu said. “The centre of the world. Like it?” 

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. For long moments she stared, at the high angles of the roofs, at the strung illumination of the lanterns that crossed and crossed again above the courtyard. “Give me a day or so.” 

She turned, and found that he was standing by the archway, a small tray between his hands, and two ceramic cups on the tray. “That’s dreadfully thoughtful.”

“It was Dawn Star’s idea.” 

“Then I’ll be sure to thank her for her generosity tomorrow.” She grinned, and when she closed the distance between them, she clasped one of the cups. The tea was hot, jasmine scented when it flooded her mouth. “And no, before you ask. I don’t have a plan right now.”

“I’m disappointed,” Zu said drily. 

“I’m sure.” She turned again, until she found the low wall. She sat, the cup balanced between her fingers. “The arena. It seems the safest to me.” 

“Safe is a tenuous word.”

“I know,” she said. “Zu, I don’t know this city. But if the princess – if Silk Fox is right, then I need to get myself closer to the assassins.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you think.”

“I think it’s a terrible idea.”

She lifted the cup again. “And if it’s the only idea?”

“It’s still a terrible idea.” He sat beside her, steam drifting up from his cup, his gaze on the indistinct blur of the gloom. “I know I can’t persuade you otherwise.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Depends on the manner of your argument.”

His head turned, his eyes narrowing slightly. “You’re laughing at me.”

“No,” she said, and sighed. “I’m lost.”

“You’re not lost. You’re uncertain.”

“And now _you’re_ speaking in riddles,” she snapped, harsher than she meant to. “You disagree with me with my plan. Very well. Then you tell me I’m uncertain. Which is it? How can I possibly gain enough perfect knowledge at this point? Our only contact in this city is someone we don't know, someone I'm not sure we should trust yet. If ever. Even if everything she says is entirely true, and she is helping us, that still leads us to the assassins.”

“That’s the problem,” Zu said, his voice roughening. “I know you want to find your master. I simply wish that it did not involve them.” 

“But?”

“But it does. They were the Order of the Lotus first,” he said. “Charged with the spiritual care of the emperor.”

“What changed?”

“Death’s Hand. He is the will of the emperor, and if it means the emperor has _allowed_ this,” he said, the words brittle, flat with anger. His shoulders shifted, easing slightly. “Forgive me. I have not spoken of – it has been some time since I was here, and I find myself thinking of – old things.” 

“Yes,” she said softly. She stared at her own hands, wrapped around the cup, the knuckles nicked and bruised. “I know I can’t tell you if it’s alright, but if you want to talk about it, it’s fine. It’s also fine if you don’t want to talk about it.” 

“Really.” 

“Really,” she said, gently mimicking his low, bemused tone. When she glanced across at him, she found him already looking at her, strangely, as if he could not quite sort through her words. “So,” she said, lighter. “What else do you wish?”

“For things to be easier,” he said. 

She smiled and lifted the cup. “I agree.” 

X

The arena devoured her days, the relentless rhythm of the fights and the circle of shouting watchers and the chanting and the way they howled the name that was not hers, loud enough that the walls rang with it. She had chosen the name without thinking, grinning back at Qui when she said it, thinking of the dragon that looped its way down the blade of her sword, the dragons she had traced on broad swathes of paper, the calligraphy brush dripping glossy black ink. The scant moments she had left she lost to the city, to the restless dead in the Necropolis, to the dreams that dragged her out of sleep, her skin soaked with sweat. 

One morning behind the tavern she found Dawn Star awake and up before her, her hair in unbound waves and her hands tilted up to catch the air as she moved, dancing her way through steps they had both learned too many years ago. 

“Aren’t you meant to be resting?” Dawn Star asked, her head turning slightly. 

“I tried,” she said, slightly apologetic. The night before had been a flurry of heat and the clamour of the arena and then the sharp, precise speed and poise of her fight with Crimson Khana. 

Dawn Star paused. “The dreams again?”

“I think of the village. Do you?”

“Too much.” Dawn Star turned properly. “Are you alright?” 

“Yes,” she answered immediately, aware that it was mostly a lie, a word thrown into the air between them. “I was thinking how it wasn’t all that many days ago that we couldn’t have imagined what we did yesterday, or the day before that.”

“Jen,” Dawn Star said, softly, her voice stretching the sound of it out, her name, half her name, the name Dawn Star had laughed and shouted and remonstrated at in equal measure. 

“I’m alright.” 

“For how long?”

Half-heartedly she glowered. “Alright. I don’t know. I need to get into that fortress. And then I want to find Master Li and ask him quite a few questions.” 

“Only quite a few?” Dawn Star smiled. “I was thinking of a lot.” 

“We might have to take turns.” She scrubbed a hand through her hair. “How do you keep that many secrets shut up inside yourself for that long?”

“You’re still talking about Master Li?” 

“Yes,” she said pointedly. “Well,” she added. “Maybe.” 

Dawn Star smiled. “I believe you. Come for a walk with me?”

“Right now?”

“Yes, right now.” Dawn Star nudged her. “We need to get you away from that arena.”

“I’m at your mercy.”

“You’re so ungrateful,” Dawn Star said mildly. “The river’s beautiful this early.” 

“You know,” she said, and leaned against Dawn Star’s shoulder. “I think that sounds like a wonderful idea.” 

X

She sat on the sill, her gaze on the glittering spread of the city. Darkness cloaked the rooftops above and still, she found that she did not want to move. Ahead, the white squares of the courtyard unraveled into the shadows. 

“Are you up early or late?” Zu asked, from somewhere behind her. 

“Late,” she admitted, and did not turn. “I was at the arena.”

“I heard. I also heard it went well.”

“That time.”

“Is that uncertainty I’m hearing?” he asked, his voice softening slightly. 

She turned then, eventually, and looked up at him. He was standing beside the archway, scarred hands clasped over each other. “A little,” she said. 

“Why?”

The bluntness did not startle her, she realised, nor did the direct, raking way he was looking at her, his dark eyes searching. Honestly, she told him, “Because Qui is putting together an Imperial Engagement, and I must fight my way through it.”

“When?”

“Two days.” 

“You have presented yourself well in the arena so far.”

“And what do you really think?”

The corner of his mouth shifted. “I think you will have to be careful, and fast, and perhaps you will come through this.”

“Perhaps?” She grinned. “Thank you so much.”

“It is different, to fight many opponents at once.”

“Yes, but we have done this many times, haven’t we?”

“It is different,” he said again. “The arena makes it so.”

“Does it?” she responded, deliberately bland. 

“Yes, and you know that.” His head tipped to one side. “Stand up.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Stand up. If you are awake, and cannot sleep, and you must fight your way through Qui’s Imperial Engagement, then let us see what we can do about it.”

Slightly reluctantly, she slid off the sill, her feet touching the floor. “Very well,” she said, brighter. “Impress me.”

“Not the other way around? You have that much faith in yourself?” 

“Well,” she said. “I suppose we will see.” 

She chose one of the wooden practice swords, padded at the end, and waited until he settled on a staff. She moved first, as she had been taught, her heels not quite on the ground, her muscles not quite tense but poised, waiting. She ducked two blows of the staff and turned into the third, whipping the sword up. Another gliding step had her closer and then tumbling past him, the flat of one hand cushioning the motion before she uncoiled upright. Snake-fast he whirled, following her. The staff dipped and wove and she met each stroke, her wrist twisting as she flicked the wooden blade. 

“You’re not surprising me,” Zu said, and yanked the staff away. 

“I thought we were sparring.”

“We are,” he said challengingly.

She grinned then, and thought she saw something in his gaze, something responding, sharpening as he looked at her. 

“Alright,” she said, and launched herself at him. 

He flung the staff up, tilting it sideways in the same motion. Her sword slid and caught just below the padded tip before she wrenched away. As fast, she spun beneath the arc of the staff and to one side. The wrapped point of the sword dragged against his shoulder. He fought the way he talked, she thought absently, deceptively quiet and as deceptively lightly. Zu closed the distance, her sword absorbing three punishingly hard strokes that drove her back another step. 

Inch by inch, she edged away, and when he lunged, she leaped over the staff. She spun upright, still moving, each motion unraveling into the next. The staff swiveled, and when she met it, she felt his weight behind the stroke. She hauled the sword sidewards, dragging his staff with it, and when he turned, his shoulder curved in, blocking her. She vaulted forward, one foot planting hard against his thigh, using his strength and his frame and his poise to throw herself over his shoulder and behind him. She whirled, some part of her thoughts aware of how he had felt, all trim muscle and practiced stance, how she had felt the shudder of contact. 

Zu turned, meeting the upswing of the sword. She gave him half a step before she danced sideways, the breath shocking from her lungs when he caught her a glancing blow just above her hip. She paused long enough to glare and realised that he was smiling – _almost smiling, almost, as much as he ever did_ – before she pushed herself off on one foot again. 

“Not bad,” Zu said eventually. He straightened up, his grip on the staff slackening. 

She balanced the sword over her shoulder, aware of sweat on her lips, beneath the pads of her fingers. “But?”

“I have a suggestion, if you will.”

“Is it a nice suggestion?”

“It’s a useful one.” He laid the staff on the ground. “When you roll, or when you jump, you give it away.”

“How?” she demanded. 

“Your shoulders roll in too early.” His head tilted, his gaze unwavering as he regarded her. “It may be that I notice this since we have fought together for some time now.” 

“And don’t you have better things to do while we’re beset by ghosts and who knows what else than watch my shoulders? Very well,” she said, when he did not reply. “Overwhelm me with your wisdom.” 

“More control of your shoulders, your back. Let your feet break the stance first, but quickly, barely,” he said mildly. “Not even the most tested master can see or sense _everything_ during a fight. Small moments can save you.” 

“Zu, I know. I,” she said, and stopped when he stepped behind her. 

“Like this,” he said, and she felt the sudden, warm pressure of his hand against the small of her back. 

In unthinking response, she straightened the arch of her spine, shifting her shoulders back. “Like that?”

“The slightest change can confuse an enemy. And you must not forget that in the arena, they are still your enemies, however much they might congratulate you afterwards.”

“Most of them don’t congratulate me,” she said. 

The rhythm of his breathing changed, as if he was swallowing a laugh. He moved, and she felt the emptiness behind her, the curious awareness of his absence. 

“No,” Zu said, and she heard his footsteps, receding. “I imagine they don’t.” 

X

“You’re hurt.”

“Yes,” she admitted ruefully. “Former Master Smiling Hawk was somewhat stronger than I anticipated.” 

“Such mistakes are dangerous,” Zu remarked. 

She reached for the stained edge of the cloth, wincing when it pulled. His fingers brushed the back of her wrist, stilling her. 

“Not like that,” he said, admonishing. “Sit down and we’ll do this the right way.”

She took the time to glare at him before complying, sinking onto the floor. She held her arm out, palm up, and kept her gaze on the blood she could see, flowering through the binding. Briskly, he unwound the cloth. Next he soaked a cleaner square of cloth in the ceramic bowl and mopped at the raw, swollen slice on her arm. Curtly he said, “This is deep. We’ll wrap it properly, and you’ll check it tomorrow morning. When do you fight next?”

“Four days. The Ravager.” She watched as he found the salve, his fingers nimble as he dipped the cloth. “I wanted to ask you for some advice.”

“About what?”

“Do you think I should approach the inquisitor?”

“You are carving out quite a name for yourself in the arena, aren’t you?” He smiled, slightly, his attention still on the cloth and the wound. The salve was cool, the scent of it crisp and fresh. “Even if it isn’t your own name. The executioner there seemed rather interested in your progress, the last I noticed.”

She grimaced slightly. “Very funny. And you haven’t answered.”

“I’m thinking,” he said. She felt the pressure of the new binding, unwinding around her arm, elbow to the base of her wrist, until deftly he tucked the edges under. “You have to find a way into the fortress. If that means seeking out this inquisitor as well, then so be it.”

“Zu, that’s not advice.”

“But it is an answer.” 

He gathered himself as if to move away from her. Instinctively – _madly, without thinking_ – she locked her hand around the back of his, her fingertips sliding over old scars and the glide of the salve. 

“I would not,” he said roughly. “The inquisitors are…it is easy to say they are all the same, the assassins. Perhaps they are. Perhaps there is no difference between how they serve Death's Hand. What becomes expected of them through their duties. But I would not want you – I would not want that to be your way into that fortress.” 

Raggedly, she exhaled. “This is going to sound ridiculous, but I was hoping you were going to say that.” 

“Why?”

“It gives me an excuse to avoid the inquisitors.” 

His eyes narrowed. “And if I said yes, they are the most pleasant type of Lotus Assassin around, you should go right now and drink wine with them, you would have…?”

“Called you a liar, and then demanded to know why you’d choose now to discover a rather dreadful sense of humour.” 

Zu snorted. “Fair enough.” 

X

The night after the Ravager was defeated, rain swept across the city. In great rippling sheets it fell, chiming against stone pathways and pattering off sloped roofs. The rain did not beat back the clinging heat of the day, and the night turned close and stifling. In the inn, she ducked past Kang and threw a smile to Dawn Star where she sat, Wildflower nestled under one arm, the little girl already flushed and dozing. With her cup still clasped in one hand and a flask in the other, she meandered her way between the cluttered tables and out, into the damp quiet of the courtyard. 

She breathed in the silence and stood for long moments, looking at nothing, and hearing only the rain. She sipped at the rice wine again, the sharp tang of it burning before it warmed. 

The shadows moved and Zu said, “Too busy inside?”

“Too busy. Too hot.” Eventually she saw him, standing statue-still. She made her way across the courtyard, the rain ribboning her face and hands. She stepped up and into the open roofed passageway. Tiny oil lamps hung, throwing spots of light on the floor, on the polished benches. “Whirlwind keeps losing to Sky. Hou’s facedown in his cups already.” 

“Revelry,” Zu said. 

“You don’t approve?” she asked, slightly teasingly. 

“I have no opinion either way.”

“That’s not much fun.” 

She held out the cup. When he gave in, his fingers circling it, she thought she saw amused resignation in his face. He drank and passed it back, pressing it into her hands. 

“For once you don’t look very,” she said, and bit back a smile. “Agitated.” 

“No? I must be slipping.” 

“How old are you?”

“Old.” 

“That’s not helpful.”

“Older than you.”

“My response is the same,” she said archly. She offered the cup again and waited until he sipped and handed it back. She sat on the bench, the red wood cool when she touched it, smooth when she slid her hand across it. “Join me?” 

“Is that an order?”

“It’s a suggestion from someone with plenty to drink.” 

Zu smiled. He sat beside her, his hands clasped loosely over his knees. He stared out and into the gloom of the courtyard, and she wondered what he was thinking. She found the ceramic flask and tipped it up until the cup was brimming. 

“You let Whirlwind kill Kai Lan.”

“He wanted to,” she said. “And he had good reason to.” 

“I understand.” 

For long moments she listened to the low rumble of sound from the inn, muted voices and laughter, her eyes on the light at the windows, the light as it spilled into the courtyard. When she held out the cup to him again, she discovered that he was looking at her, strangely, almost quizzically, as if he was searching for something to say. 

“What is it?” she asked. 

“I’m remembering what we spoke of. What I said, about you drinking wine with assassins.”

“You’re different. And you’re just one assassin. Former assassin.” 

“That’s,” he said, and lifted the cup. “Not much of a compliment.”

She grinned. “Sorry. What was it like, in the marshes?”

“Wet,” he responded wryly. “Quiet. Bandits, sometimes. Not often, not before Gao’s men.” 

“You enjoyed it?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I endured it.”

“I think I understand. Where did you live?”

“There are ruins. When I was first there, I moved between them. Years later I moved less.” 

“That seems,” she said, and shrugged. “I don’t know. Lonely.” 

“I suppose it was. What was it like at Two Rivers?”

“It was home,” she said honestly. She turned slightly, her shoulder grazing his. “I don’t remember anywhere else. If I think back to the first things I know, I think of there, and I think of Dawn Star.”

“You and she were always friends?” 

“Yes,” she said. “At least I think so. It seems that way now.” She found herself smiling, unbidden, and added, “She and I…we’ve always been there. If that makes any kind of sense.” 

“It makes some kind of sense."

“When the village --” The words caught in her throat, stone-heavy. “The others…it was terrible.”

“But?”

“But damn you for knowing that it’s not that simple,” she said lightly. She grasped the cup again. “I went into that cave knowing that I would find her. That I would’ve torn Gao apart to get to her.” 

“That is because you are afflicted with a terrible sense of nobility.”

“Maybe I just like fighting monsters.” She sighed and added, “We’d talked about it, leaving Two Rivers. Going somewhere else. Wandering. We didn’t know what or when. We hadn't decided, or even really thought it through.”

“And sometimes the choice is taken from you.”

“Or given to you,” she said thoughtfully. “Though perhaps not when you assume.”

“Careful,” Zu said mildly. “Now you’re sounding like me.” 

“Not much of a compliment,” she retorted, and when he smiled – _properly, unfettered and open_ – her stomach clenched. 

The wind gusted, and the oil lamps swayed, spattered by the rain as it billowed under the angles of the roof. She watched the tiny points of light as they swung. When he pushed the cup into her hands she drank again, the wine fiery enough to make her blink. She hunted for something to say, failed, and silently wondered if it even mattered. She shifted, her shoulder settling against his. She felt him shudder, tensing, and thought he might gather himself away from her, and whatever this strange, comfortable quiet meant. 

Instead, he stayed, and she sat beside him, the cup balanced between their hands while the night unraveled. 


	2. Part Two

The morning she meant to go to the fortress she woke before the dawn. She stole outside, and into the soft humid gloom, the executioner’s token clamped between her hands. She had stared at it in the stifling confines of her room, run her fingers over it and over it, until she had learned the sharp edges of it. Out here, it seemed unchanged, cold and heavy, all hard lines against her hands. 

_It was her way in and she needed it and she needed to go._

When the sun sank, she thought. When the darkness came. When the night combed its way over the city. When she could make her way to the pagoda in the Necropolis quickly and quietly. 

“Dawn Star said you were up already,” Zu said from somewhere behind her, and her stomach twisted twisted painfully. 

Briefly she wondered if she had ever truly meant to take herself away without framing fears into words, without saying anything at all. She turned and summoned a smile, edged and raw, and she knew he would see through it. “I couldn’t sleep.” 

“I would speak with you, if you do not mind.”

She lifted her head and smiled. “You don’t usually ask.”

“No.” He hesitated, his gaze on the ground, and his hands wrapped around each other. “This is different. May I join you?” 

She nodded, and when he did, he sat cross-legged, his face closed-off and cold. “The fortress,” he said. “I do not think this is a good idea.”

“You’re telling me this today? Right now?” She shook her head. “Then what else would you have me do?”

“I don’t know. I do know that I have seen men and women walk into that place’s walls and return changed.” 

“I won’t be changed,” she snapped, louder than she intended. 

“Jen Zi,” he said, and suddenly, terribly, she wondered when he had last used her name, or if he had, ever. “There are shadows in that place that you cannot imagine.”

“Then tell me. Help me.” 

“If you go there,” he said, his voice roughening. His head lifted, his gaze finding hers. “Something will happen.”

“Yes. It will. I will work my way through them all until I find my answers. That is what will happen.”

“You’re so young. It’s easy to say such things.” 

“Then help me,” she said again, hearing the frayed, imploring note in her own words. “Tell me what to do. How to appear. How to speak.” 

“Vanity,” he said. 

“Vanity. The assassins?”

“Yes. Not in the way you would think. Not jewels, or bright cloth, or silk, or wealth. The beauty of their determination. Their accomplishments.” His mouth twisted, and he added, “In the way their bodies change as they become assassins.” 

“I don’t plan on being there _that_ long,” she said, and she knew he could hear it as well, the way her voice was faltering. 

“If you truly mean to do this, may I offer some advice?”

“That’s…not what I thought you were going to say.”

“What did you think I was going to say?”

She shrugged. “Something about how I must be completely insane by now.”

A smile ghosted across his mouth, gone as quickly. “They will be suspicious regardless.”

“But?”

“Take yourself and your sword and nothing else. Find new clothes. Dress simply. No jewels, no ribbons, nothing in your hair.” 

“I don’t usually,” she said immediately and made herself pause. “I mean, yes. I'm listening.” 

“Show them you mean what you say. There is no quicker way.” 

“I can do that.”

“You don’t know what you’re speaking of,” he said harshly. 

“Then _tell_ me,” she snapped, closing her fingers around the token until the edges of it bit into her skin. “What terrible things did you do?”

“Too many things.”

She dug her teeth into the inside of her cheek to push back the sudden flare of anger. “You’re giving me threats and half truths.”

“You want to hear about the men and women I’ve killed? The men and women I’ve ruined?” 

His voice was rising, sharply and furiously, and she cut across him. “Zu. I didn’t mean…I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m sorry for, but I am.” 

“No,” he said, softer. “You asked for help and I gave you none.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I certainly plan on giving Dawn Star the hundred and six hair ribbons I own now.” 

His head tilted, and he stared at her for a long moment, searchingly. “That day in the swamps,” he said. “You were not what I expected. You still aren’t.”

“What did you expect?”

“A student.”

“I was.”

“Arrogant, talented.”

“Again,” she said, and smiled. 

“But not just such things.” He was still looking at her, looking at her as if he was searing the memory of her into his thoughts.

“Zu,” she said, her voice faltering. “I’m coming back.”

“Yes. I know you are.” 

X

The day meandered towards its close as she dragged the whetstone down the blade of her sword. Dragged it down over the dragon pattern and towards the hilt again and again until she could see herself, trapped, floating in it. 

“He’s not here,” Dawn Star said behind her, the words shaking, as if she did not believe her own voice. “Zu, I mean. I can’t find him. He wasn’t there when we ate. He’s not….he didn’t say anything to you?”

"It’s fine,” she said flatly. 

“It’s not.”

“No. It's really not.” 

“Jen,” Dawn Star said, and caught her wrist. 

“We’ve talked about this. I go. Just me. There’s no sense in me pulling any of you along with me.”

“Jen,” Dawn Star said again. 

She turned away, reaching for the simple black lacquered pins. She swept her hair up and twisted the heavy weight of it at the nape of her neck, wrapping it into a single uncomplicated knot. “They’re expecting one recruit. I’ll find you afterwards. I know it’s a terrible thing to ask.”

“It is.” Pointedly Dawn Star added, “Do you know where he is?”

She swallowed, the inside of her mouth sandy. “No,” she said, knowing it was half a lie, mostly a lie, a thought that she could not quite acknowledge.

“What if you never come out?”

“I’ll come out.” 

“What if?” 

“Then you go the palace,” she said fiercely. “Somehow you go to the palace. Make Silk Fox take you there. You’ll go there and you’ll ask things of the emperor and you’ll find Master Li.”

“Ask the emperor,” Dawn Star said, and smiled faintly. “Of course.” 

“I’m coming back,” she said, and wrapped her arms around Dawn Star’s shoulders, pulling her close, their embrace suddenly frantic. “I will.” 

Somehow she wrenched herself away, and somehow she made herself march through the city’s undulating streets. She was clad as Zu had suggested, a grey tunic over grey leggings and black boots, the clothes almost shapeless and caught against her waist by her sash. Her sword at her side and a pouch with a tiny clutch of coin. The token, pressed hard into her palm. In the seething silence of the Necropolis, she made her way up the steps and towards the pagoda. It slanted high and dark above, cutting the fading sunlight. As she had been told, she opened the door and crossed the floor, her feet dragging long marks in the dust. She pressed the token into the small indentation above the scooped hollow of the alcove and waited, hearing the shuddering rumble beneath her feet. 

X

The darkness breathed here, she thought. It breathed from the walls and into the assassins who had told her where to go and who to answer to, and two days enmeshed in this strange shadowy cage, she found herself running errands for Master Gang. The others she glided past and spoke only if there was no other option. Sometimes they spoke to her, and she answered briefly and tersely. She ate with them, wordlessly, and trained with them as silently. Some of them commended her on her speed and her agility and her skill, and she made sure to note their names and their faces for when they came for her, later, when she might least expect it. Her sword went everywhere with her, the great hall and the mines, the slave chambers and the soul extraction room, and she battled her thoughts and made herself listen and nod and say the right words. 

They gave her a room, a tiny curve-walled cell that mercifully had a door, and a heavy lock. They gave her parchments and scrolls, and ordered that she read through them, and be tested. 

The tenth night, she stumbled into the room shaking with exhaustion, and shouldered the door closed. As clumsily, she shoved the lock into place and fumbled for the small oil lamp. The flame danced, licking over the pallet and the deep pitted gouges above the door and Zu, where he sat against the wall. 

“Are you _trying_ to scare me?” she hissed after her heart had stopped thudding desperately against her ribs. 

“No.” 

He had changed, she thought, and tried to quell the sudden lurch of her heartbeat. He was dressed like _they_ were, black sleeveless armour and black tunic beneath, dark enough to swallow the lamplight, dark enough to deepen the shadows beneath his eyes. He _knew_ this place, she thought, and that awareness clawed its way under her skin. He had been taught here, he had learned how to fight here, how to move and melt into the shadows. 

“Zu,” she said, his name rolling heavy and uncertain off her tongue. “Are you still you?” 

“Yes. Are you?”

“Why are you here?” 

“You cannot do this alone.”

“You might have said something before.” 

“How? _I will find you there, but I cannot yet tell you exactly when_? Would that have sufficed?” 

Conceding, she nodded. “You know what I have to do.”

It was not a question, and he dipped his head, acknowledging. “A spirit shard for a golem. And not a simple golem. One of their jade golems.” 

She thought of the smothering press of the air in the extraction chamber, the walls green and thick with moss and the frame beneath the high pillars. Straps fixed to wood and the leather there all sodden and stiff with blood. “They’re using slaves. Killing them outright for the golems.”

“Their brutality is growing more efficient.” 

“Is there another way? I mean,” she said, struggling suddenly with the words, with the knowledge of it. “I don’t want to kill a slave. And I really don’t want to give them a spirit shard that will work.”

“The corruption here runs deep,” he said. “But there might be. There are graves below this place. Places where the dead lie.” 

The silence surged, uncomfortable now, febrile and uncertain. Finally, she sat, sinking onto the floor near him, her shoulders sliding against the wall. The oil lamp chimed against the floor, tracing marigold lines across her boots. She thought she could hear the fortress around them, rippling with it all, the energy of the golems as they bided and the restless spirits and the dreadful awareness of the assassins who worked them.

“Zu,” she said. 

He must have heard the terrible desperation smoking through her voice. “If you mean to go through with this, there are things I must tell you.” 

Ten days buried in the darkness of this fortress and before she could think otherwise, she closed the distance between them, her back still against the wall, her arm against his. She closed her fingers around the back of his wrist, corded with muscle and scarred. “Tell me,” she murmured. 

“It was when Dirge was burning,” he said, each word low and barely breathed-out, as if he was wrestling with them, wrestling the memory of it. “Most of us were sent there. I was not. I stayed, as did some others, and the order came through. Treachery had happened, the emperor betrayed. We were sent to kill Sun Li’s wife and child and all his household.” 

She swallowed. _Nothing_ , she knew, _nothing_ could be said to this, to the agony of this knowledge, this bladed secret that he had kept knotted up inside for far too long. Instead, she looked at him, silently and not censuring. 

“She had given birth,” Zu said, his eyes glassy with the distance of recollection. “Sun Li’s wife, lying there. We had been ordered, and we could not question the wisdom of it. Better a coward than one who dares question the emperor.” Bitterly, he added, “Which is what I was that day. I hesitated, and they killed her. The order was wrong, the order _had_ to be wrong, and I did nothing.”

“Zu,” she said, helplessly. 

“They killed her before I thought to do anything.”

“What did you do?”

“I killed them,” he said simply. “All of them. One by one until the room was full of them. And I took the child and I ran. And for a long time I have wondered what kind of creature gives an order like that. And what kind of creature obeys.” 

“The child was Master Li’s?” 

“Yes. She was.” 

She sucked in a sharp breath. Too many thoughts assailed her, too many possibilities, knife-edged and painful. “Why wait until now to tell me?” 

“I did not know what you would do.” 

“You don’t trust anyone,” she said mildly. 

“That’s not true,” he said, growling the words out. 

She felt herself smiling slightly. “When you told me about this place. I thought…I don’t know what I thought.”

He blinked, slowly, as if he was shaking himself out of the prison of his own words. “What do you think now?”

“I think I want you to stay here. With me. If you want to.”

“I want to,” he said, the words almost a sigh. 

“What if they find you?”

“They won’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“No,” he said, one side of his mouth shifting slightly. 

She found herself laughing, quietly, the sound halfway to a sob. “So,” she said thickly. “What do we do after this?”

“Not this,” he said wryly. “Ever again.” 

“Fair enough. Then we’ll leave, and we’ll wander, and I’ll make you laugh.”

“Really,” he said, his dark gaze shifting and finding hers. 

“Yes, at least once.” 

Something in his face changed, softening. Wordlessly, Zu curled his hand beneath hers, his fingers grazing the inside of her wrist. The oil lamp trembled, sputtering as it ran dry. The shadows rushed up and closed over them both, over the way their hands were laced together. 

X

She woke to the expected sound of footsteps, and lanternlight under the door, and needling awareness that her neck was horribly stiff. She moved, her shoulder bumping Zu’s before she froze. “You’re still here,” she said, her voice sandy with sleep. 

“You thought I wouldn’t be?”

“I thought you’d vanish into the wall or whatever it was you did last time.”

He arched an eyebrow at her. “I cunningly came in through the door, if you must know.”

“That’s not nearly as exciting.” She was stalling, and she knew it, throwing up words between them as if they could stop her having to stand and go and pretend to be one of them again. “Yes,” she said eventually. “These graves. Where the dead lie. Below the mines?” 

“Yes,” he said, and nodded. “I will meet you there.”

“Very well.” Almost awkwardly, she reached up to her hair, heavy and sweat-damp and in need of a decent soaking. She shoved the plain black pins in firmly at her nape. “Did you,” she said, and almost lost her nerve. Eschewing patience, and decorum, and all the other tidy, simple things she had thought of once, she said, “Did you sleep well?” 

“Not really,” Zu said, and one side of his mouth sloped up. “But that was more to do with the floor, and the place we are in, and not to do with you.”

“I’m flattered,” she retorted mildly. She uncoiled upright, wincing when her muscles twinged in protest. 

She discovered the corridor outside already busy with apprentices as they wound their way to their masters for the day’s tasks. Others lit the huge hanging lanterns that threw splotches of yellow light against the polished dark floors. The air was heavy, she thought, a miasma dense with the shadows, with the whispers, with the way the assassins padded through the silences. She ate with the others as she had the past ten days, scooping up rice and wordlessly reaching for the water pitcher. 

In the mines there was the restless spirit of Zeng Sai, shouting out his rage against her, against the Spirit Monk that she was. When he fell, the ephemeral edges of him breaking apart, she set about the terrible business of gathering the rest of him, the years-polished bones locked in the damp earth. 

"I’m sorry,” Zu said, quietly. “I had to know. I had to be sure.”

She hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“They say the horsemen of the plains were defeated by the people of Dirge. Your people. If that was true, then Zeng Sai should have felt it in you, your heritage.” 

“You thought I,” she said, the words drying up. "You thought I might've lied."

“I’m sorry.”

“You thought I might not be what I say I am. Even _now?_ ” 

Impassive, he said nothing. 

“I have _never_ been anything other than what I have said. Why you would,” she said, and drew in a shuddering breath. “Forgive me. I need to go. There are – I have things to do.” 

She marshaled her nerves and used the extractor, and once it was finished, she stared, sickened, at the blade-sharp shard it left behind. Five more days slithered past. She saw Zu only once, and in the silence afterwards she desperately tried to shove the thought from her mind, that he would be found, caught, dragged out somewhere and killed. Master Gang’s relentless orders filled her days, and when finally she scythed Master Shin’s feet out from under him and watched him bleed out on the floor of the great hall, she found herself too numb to dredge up a reaction. As promised, she hauled the body into the golem press and as mechanically, she showed Master Gang the evidence of it, of this brisk insidious treachery. 

In the suffocating silence of her room, she stared blindly up at the darkness, kept awake by the unceasing churn of her own thoughts. 

The emperor and Death’s Hand and too many golems, their empty eyes watching. The assassins and what they meant and who they belonged to. Death’s Hand, murmured with reverence by the assassins, their heads bowing when they framed the name, or the title, whichever it was. The way of things, all jarred out of order, and the Water Dragon and her restless dead. She clamped one hand around the amulet and willed her thoughts flat and blank and eventually, sleep claimed her. 

X

The cautious slide of footsteps woke her, and then the scrape of someone’s fingers against the door. She rolled upright and hissed, “Who is it?”

“Me,” Zu answered, as quietly. 

“Is it safe?”

“Here?” he responded wryly. 

She snorted. She unlatched the door and gestured him inside before she reached for the lamp. She turned, and his half-unexpected proximity startled her. The flame caught and flared, lapping over his hands and the scar that crossed his face. 

“Where have you been?” she asked. 

“Hiding.”

“That’s less than helpful.” 

“This place is full of tunnels, rooms. Old corners even the assassins forget.”

“That’s slightly more helpful.” She stepped away from him, still not liking the black tunic on him, the red lotus symbol emblazoned across his chest, rippling when he moved. A flower, perhaps, or a hand or flames, red petals or red fingers uncoiling upward. “I am to meet Grand Inquisitor Jia tomorrow.”

“Then you are nearing the end of your goal.”

“Don’t do that,” she said, more angrily than she meant to. 

“What?”

“Speak like it doesn’t matter. Sound like it doesn’t matter.”

“It _does_ matter,” Zu snapped. “It matters too much to put it into the right way of sounding. Or would you prefer that I think your chances are small, even now? Would you prefer that I tell you that however it goes with Jia, if you go up against Death’s Hand, you will fail?” 

Obstinate as rock, she flung back at him, “I won’t fail.” 

“Then be fast. Be fast and be clever and do _not_ engage Death’s Hand.” 

“What is he, that he makes even you speak of him like this?”

“I don’t know what he is.” 

She exhaled sharply, some of the tension seeping from her shoulders. Helplessly, she shrugged. “Do you want to sit down?” 

“When I can pace instead?” The strain around his eyes softened slightly. He turned, as if he was going to sit against the wall again, but she shook her head. 

“Just sit here,” she said quietly. She sank onto the edge of the pallet and waited, wordlessly. 

For long moments he stayed standing before he gave in, sitting beside her, his gaze pinned on the door. “There are things you need to know.”

“More riddles?”

“No,” he said. “Get what you need from Jia. Whatever evidence you need to convince Silk Fox. Get it and go. Do not stay for Death’s Hand. Leave when you can. That is all.”

“Zu.” She looked at him, his face as unreadable as his voice. “Why so insistent?”

“Can’t I be concerned?” 

“It sounds like,” she said, and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’ve spent too long talking to Master Gang. I keep looking for layers and layers under those layers.” 

“Which is why you need to leave, and as soon as you can.” 

“I was rebuked yesterday for not having markings yet.” 

He went rigid, his hands clenching hard against each other. “What did you say?”

“I lied and said I’d have them in time.”

“Not the sharpest response.” 

“You’d prefer that I was on my way down to get my first set of scars, would you?” She bit at the inside of her cheek. “I am so sorry. I don’t know why I said that.” 

“It’s this place.”

“Yes,” she said, for something to say, something to fill the emptiness between them. “It is.”

“Jen,” he said, his voice running across hers. “Tomorrow…”

“Later today, I suppose.” 

His mouth shifted into a half-smile, lopsided as he looked at her. “Yes.”

“What were you going to say?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. 

“I don’t either,” she said, and found herself almost laughing, her throat constricting with it. “Was it like this when you were trained?”

“You mean, did I spend my time sneaking into other people’s rooms, or..?” 

“You really do discover a sense of humour at the strangest times.” She relaxed back against the pallet slightly, her elbows taking her weight. “And there are easier ways to say that you don’t want to talk about it.”

“It was different. I was young, then. For a time I thought I wanted what this place offered. What it meant.” 

She looked up at him, at the chiseled angles of his profile. “Did you ever think it would come to this?”

“Knowing every possible step is something gifted to the greatest masters and not to me, I think.” He turned, his eyes settling on hers. “I did wonder if I would ever come back here, and why I might.”

“And why have you?” She shook her head. “Ignore me. I’m talking because I don’t know what else to do.”

“No,” Zu said, softly. “I’m here because you need to be here. Because this is the only way.” 

Without thinking – _almost without thinking, without wondering too much_ – she caught his wrist and tugged. He ended up beside her, the black tunic rumpling. The pallet was narrow, and she wriggled back slightly. He opened his mouth as if he thought he should say something, and she shook her head. In response, something in his gaze eased, dark and thoughtful. 

“I’m supposing you don’t have anywhere to go right now,” she said. 

Crookedly he smiled. “No. Not that I know of.” 

She looked at him, at the scar that tracked the length of his face, descending from his cheekbone and cutting into his mouth. She felt the pulsing silence of the fortress around them, the quiet impatience of the night as it ticked away. 

“We’re burning what you’re wearing,” she said. “As soon as we get out of here.”

“You don’t like it?” he asked, drily. 

“It’s not the best you’ve looked.”

“I’m flattered.” 

“Don’t be,” she told him, and when she lifted her gaze to his face again, she froze. He was looking at her searchingly, hungrily, the way she had been looking at him, the way she had tried not to look at him. He said her name again, and she felt his breath on her lips. She flattened her hand against his chest, over the red splash of the lotus symbol. Wordlessly he covered the back of her hand with his, holding her there, holding her against the slow thump of his heartbeat. 

“I have to go,” she said. “Soon.” 

“Not yet.” 

“No,” she said. “Not yet.” 

Together they lay there, listening to the fortress and the shadows, clinging to each other, and clinging to what they had not said. 

X

Grand Inquisitor Jia was smaller than she had thought, small and wiry and imbued with the unsettling, stone-grey determination of the fortress. The woman moved like poured oil, fast and vanishing and always an inch away from the arc of her sword. Close to furious, she tightened her grip on the hilt and threw herself forward again. The point of her sword dug against Jia’s shoulder, the woman jolting away in response. 

As fast, she twisted, the flat of the blade striking hard against Jia’s forearm, shoving her back. Another pivot had her inside the woman’s guard, and she slammed the sword into the woman’s chest, angling the blade up and under the curve of her ribcage. Afterwards, she climbed the stone steps, each one smooth and slippery and gleaming. She was aware of the rush of water, spilling and rushing either side of the carved throne. 

Jia’s words roiled in her head, the venomous promise that Death’s Hand would be here soon, and that he would be given the last Spirit Monk because she had had the audacity to come here. 

She saw the amulet fragment first, ragged at the edges and glinting. She dropped it into the pouch at her waist and turned, her gaze searching the shadows between the high pillars until she found Zu, his shoulders against the stone and his eyes on her. 

“I wondered where you were.”

“Did you,” he responded in the same wry tone. 

She was three steps down when she saw his face change, when he shouted for her to move, his voice rough with something very close to panic. Obstinately she whirled back, her hand dropping to her sword hilt.

Death’s Hand, and the sudden, impossible sight of him – _of him, of it, of whatever it was behind black encasing armour_ – froze thought and breath. She had time to note his swords, and the coiled way he was walking, each footfall soft and almost silent against the steps, his armour ribboned with the water. He had come through the rock and through the glassy spill of the water and she could not muster locked muscles to move. 

He kicked her, throwing her back, and she felt it, the absurd steely strength in him, in whatever he was. Her shoulders hit first, her head jolting hard against the floor. She scrabbled onto her side, breath coming in wheezing gulps. His shadow slanted over her, and madly she rolled away. Another kick landed solidly against her chest, and she gritted her teeth against the shocking pain of it. 

Awkwardly, she scrambled upright, aware of him moving, turning, following her. She stumbled, and when hands closed on her arm, she tried to wrestle away. 

“I’ve got you,” Zu snapped. “Come on.” 

Somehow she did, leaning desperately against the sheltering press of his shoulder. She pushed herself faster, one arm latched around his waist, aware of how he was half carrying her, of how her feet were sliding. Zu said her name, the words strangled and thick, and then he was pushing her, pushing her ahead of him, through the high stone pillars. 

She turned, aware of the sawing pain in her chest, the dizzying recognition of cracked ribs and exhaustion. 

She saw Zu first, and then Death’s Hand, his swords dipping, shearing through empty air. Zu darted away, and she wanted to scream at him to pull his staff over his shoulder, to move faster, to _do something_. Zu spun again, and as relentlessly, Death’s Hand followed him, both blades biting hard against one of the pillars, yanking out dust and bit of stone. He rolled away, and she saw the rigid, frantic set to his shoulders. Backstepping, he ducked another scything sweep of the swords. 

She felt it beneath her feet, the shifting of the stone, the pillars as they shuddered and abruptly, she understood. Fiercely she grasped her sword and hurled herself back towards the pillars. Death’s Hand moved faster, his momentum spinning his right-hand sword until the blade was buried in Zu’s chest. 

She snarled Zu’s name, his name or something like it, the sound torn apart by anger. 

She was paces away when the pillars crumbled, the appalling din of it swallowing her footsteps and her heartbeat and the unsteady roaring in her head. The sword dropped from her hand, ringing hard against the floor. She found the edge of the nearest stone piece, rough and thick with dust and wrapped her hands around it. Two heaving wrenches did not move it, and nor did a third or a fourth and too quickly she lost count. She tried another, and another, until the dust was coating the inside of her mouth and clinging to the corners of her eyes. Somewhere behind she heard footsteps, running and rapid, and then the shouts of the assassins, their voices swimming amid the dust. 

She turned, reaching for the sword, bleeding fingers wrapping around the hilt, and knew she would carve her way through them. 

X

The night was nearly spent by the time she bolted through the tavern archway. She was shaking, her tunic clinging to sweat-damp shoulders. Her sword was a mess, slicked with blood and slammed back into its sheath filthy because she did not know what else to do with it. Her thoughts were worse, upended and torn open and she kept _seeing_ it, seeing him. She stumbled through the courtyard, and into the lamplit gloom of the corridor. Her hand thumped against Dawn Star’s door before she had time to consider otherwise, her fingers trembling. 

The door slid wide, followed by Dawn Star, a long-bladed knife in one hand. “Jen,” she said, and blinked. “You’re – you’re here. I’m so sorry. Come in.” 

She was barely into the soft, warm dark of the room before the words rushed from her mouth. “I’m fine,” she lied. “I’m fine. I had to – there were a lot of them, in the end. The whole fortress. Gone.”

“How?”

“The assassins and their golems,” she said. She twisted her hands against each other. “Can we talk later?”

Carefully Dawn Star said, “If you’d like.” 

“Can you,” she said, and clutched at her sword hilt again. “I’d really like a bath.”

Dawn Star smiled, softly. “Alright. I’ll rustle up some help.” 

She trailed after Dawn Star, half-listening as she ousted the tavern-keeper’s servants too early, as she asked for hot water and the use of the bigger bath chambers. Afterwards, she peeled off her clothes and left them there, heaped and blood-splashed. She felt the fortress in her thoughts, the silence of it, the way he had moved through the shadows there. She sat in the welcome heat of the bath and stared at her own hands, indistinct beneath the shimmer of the water. 

“Lean forward,” Dawn Star murmured. 

Numbly, she obeyed. She was aware of Dawn Star moving, and then the sensation of her hands, gathering her hair away from her neck. The drag of the comb, and then the sudden rush of warm water. Dawn Star repeated the motions again and again until her hair was soaked clean, straggling her shoulders. 

“Talk to me,” Dawn Star said, as softly. 

She opened her mouth, licked at cracked lips and wondered how she could say it. What she had seen. What she had done. What she had lost. 

“The emperor,” she said, almost silently. “He is as corrupted as Death’s Hand. As all of the empire is.”

“What else?” Dawn Star said. She sat on the edge of the bath, her robes rustling around her. “Not the politics.”

“You’re very astute. Did you know that?”

“And you’re terrible at evading.”

She stared at nothing and said, “Zu is dead.” 

“What?” 

“He was there. He was there with me. He helped me.” 

“Jen,” Dawn Star said, her voice wavering. 

“He saved me.” Her voice stayed flat. “Death’s Hand was there, and he pushed me away and that was it.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I tried,” she said. “I mean, I couldn’t.” 

Dawn Star leaned over the edge and wrapped an arm around her, her sleeve wicking up water, her hand finding Jen’s shoulder. “I know.” 

“Death’s Hand. He came through the rock. Through the water. I don’t know. I wanted,” she said, and her throat closed up. 

“I think I understand,” Dawn Star said, very gently. 

She turned her head against Dawn Star’s shoulder. Her eyes were dry and gritty, so she closed them. Mercifully, Dawn Star said nothing else, only handed her soap and afterwards, dry robes. Palest green, she found herself noticing, brushing her bare ankles and couching the damp weight of her hair. At the door to her room, Dawn Star hovered, but she shook her head, and made herself say something about wanting to sleep. 

In the room, the air was heavy and stale. She left the oil lamp burning, and she stared at the bright point of its flame until it was all she could see, all that she allowed her thoughts to frame. 

X

“Cracked rib,” Dawn Star said. Her fingers slipped higher, and Jen flinched again. “You should have said something yesterday.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“I know. Anything else?”

“More bruises than I’ve ever had at any one time.” 

Dawn Star smiled, fleetingly. She passed across a folded length of cloth, and said, “Wrap it tight as you can bear it until the pain eases.”

“It’s fine.” She hesitated. “Thank you. For being here.”

Dawn Star smiled, the angles of her face softening. “I was so worried. We all were. There was so much we didn’t know.” 

She wound the cloth around her ribs, exhaling at the sudden, aching pressure. She was too aware of Dawn Star’s silence, of the words that she should have said, of the name she should have said. She reached for her tunic and eased it on, her fingers absently knotting the collar closed. 

“He knew,” she said, eventually, whisper-quiet. “I know that. Now I know that. He knew he wasn’t leaving.” 

“You don’t know that. Not really.”

“Yes,” she said. “When we talked, he only ever said that I would leave. He never said anything about himself, and I never let myself notice. Foolish.” 

“Not foolish.”

“Blind.” 

“Keep thinking up as many words as you want. I can keep thinking up ways to tell you otherwise.”

For a brief, surging moment, she was furious, the anger bristling under her skin. Furious at herself, for all the times she had hidden behind words as if they were barriers, borders, for all the times she had pretended that there would always be other moments. _Focus_ , she thought. Focus and stillness and she needed to banish it, this rushing anger that had its hooks in her. 

Carefully, she pulled herself up onto the wide window sill, her breath hitching slightly. Dawn Star joined her, sitting opposite, her knees drawn up. 

“So it seems we’ll have even more to ask the emperor,” Dawn Star said, almost wryly. 

“A lot more.” 

“And Death’s Hand?” 

“Before I kill him,” she said fiercely, “I will know what he is.” 

X

The days unraveled, and she crossed and recrossed too many paths, into the palace and out through the empty coldness of death. Through the biting winds of Dirge, and out through the blood of soldiers and assassins. Through dreams, and out through the remembered burning homes of Two Rivers until she dragged herself awake. 

And at the centre of everything, Master Li. 

In dreams and between heartbeats she tore her thoughts apart trying to see it, some sign of it, some tiny barely-there signal that would show her how he had done it. How he had kept it wrapped inside himself for so many years, the truth of himself and his brothers and how so very patiently he had waited. 

To learn, but not too much. To see, but not too clearly. To succeed, but not entirely.

She remembered Dirge and the dragon fountains, and the white blaze of the water there. The shocking change when the Water Dragon sent her through the last gateway, and she had breathed, properly, deeply, the air dragging sharp and chill across her tongue. The way Dawn Star had dreamed it, somehow, had known, and had ordered the others into the flyer and through the steep treacherous peaks until they had found the monastery. She remembered huddling in furs and trying to pull apart the tents at the same time, the wind snatching at cape and gloves and her hair while she muttered something about never wanting to be so cold again. And how Dawn Star had smiled, and said something back about how surely this place with all its snow and its cold was her heritage, _hers_ , so should she not be completely at ease here? Helplessly and despite herself she had laughed, the sound of it swallowed by the wind. 

She remembered the Water Dragon, beautiful and robed in rippling blue, her words heavy with distance, with time, with something very like sadness. She remembered shoving back the terrible urge to ask about the dead, and where they might be. 

The days ran away from her until she stood inside the coiling passageways of the Imperial Palace once again, amid the scent of incense and ink. Dawn Star beside her and Sky and Princess Lian behind them both and she could hear the others, impatient to move forward, impatient to demand answers. 

“You’re ready,” Dawn Star said, and it was half a question. 

“I’m terrified,” she answered, and heard Dawn Star’s gulping, uneven laugh in answer. 

“I don’t think you’re the only one.” 

X

Master Li was faster than she remembered, each motion sinuous and practiced and she fought to match him. She sought his face, sought to find him somewhere in his own eyes, and failed. _Already_ , she thought, already he had killed her once, and she felt the ferocity in each measured strike that cracked hard against her forearms and the flats of her hands. Snake-quick, he was past her again, his foot lashing out. The blow buckled her leg, and she staggered. Close to frantic, she wrestled with her footing. Another strike sent her sidewards, and as fast, his hand curled around her wrist, clamping hard. 

She felt the magic first, and then the rushing sound of it, ice or rock or both as it crackled out and encased her. 

She opened her eyes to greyness, and part of her wondered how far this illusion might stretch, how deep his shackles went. His voice filled her head, and desperately she pushed it aside. At her feet she saw water, grey and empty as the dome of what she supposed was the sky above. 

A prison, she understood. A prison carved out of Master Li’s thoughts, locking her in place here and in the palace and however much she glared at the lapping water or the air above, she saw nothing. For too long she walked, her feet soaking, sometimes turning in circles, sometimes shouting out to Master Li, sometimes ignoring the ripple of his voice in her head. She thought sometimes that she heard the others, Dawn Star’s voice quiet with determination, Whirlwind confused and Sky cajoling him on and it was absurd since she was almost certain she was alone. 

The water lapped at her ankles. Obstinately, she pushed on, her gaze fixed on the horizon. She walked until she thought the line between sky and water changed, until she found herself staring at a pillar, the twisting figures of dragons chasing each other through the stone. 

Between breaths, the air stirred and shifted. Her sword rattled clear and she spun, the blade arcing until it settled under Zu’s chin. 

Painfully, she swallowed. “Are you trying to scare me?”

“No,” he said, quietly. 

“Are you,” she said, and gripped the hilt. She bit back the awful urge to laugh, or scream. “Are you _you?_ ” 

“It’s not a trick,” he said. “Your master has not conjured me. I know you’re trapped.” 

He was not quite there, she thought. The angles of his shoulders were blurred, and even standing this close, she could not feel him breathing. 

“Death’s Hand,” she said, before she could think better of it. “I set him free.”

He exhaled sharply, or seemed to, his shoulders sinking slightly. 

“He was Prince Kin.”

“The brother,” Zu said. 

“I wasn’t going to,” she said, and heard her own voice thicken. “I wanted – I wanted everything else but that. I wanted him dead, and not quickly. It was in Dirge. It felt – when I spoke to him, I spoke to Sun Kin. Or whatever was left of Sun Kin.” She lowered her sword. Desperately, she asked, “How is it that you are here?”

The line of his mouth softened slightly. “I thought you might need the help.” 

“I think you might be right. He’s too strong.”

“No,” Zu said fiercely. “He’s not. You think he is, but he can’t be.”

“The last time I fought him,” she said, and her voice ran dry. 

“I know.”

“How?”

“I’m not even sure,” he answered. “I’ve stayed. Waited. Sometimes I heard.”

“Heard?”

“You.” 

_Words_ , she thought. Words were all that remained, strung out between them, shaped in air and as tremulous. “We found the Water Dragon.”

“Is there nothing you have not accomplished?” 

“Yes. Too much,” she snapped, and wondered if he could read it in her face, the fortress, and how she had left it. She sheathed her sword and heard the solid sound of the blade snicking home in the scabbard, the gush of the water over her feet. “This is very strange.” 

Zu’s smile returned, the slightest movement of his mouth. “Yes, it is. And we must send you back to yourself.” 

“That simply.”

“You’re arguing with me.” His voice turned mild, marveling. "You are arguing with me, _here_."

“A little.” She laid one hand against his chest, feeling the strangeness of skin and bone and muscle that was not properly there. Not as cold as she thought he would have been, not as warm as he had been before. “There’s so much that I wanted,” she said. 

_To say_. _To do_. _To give in to_ , she thought, and she tried to swallow past the constriction in her throat. 

“You will leave here.” 

“That’s not what I meant.” 

“I know what you meant,” he said, his voice rough and cutting across hers. 

She let herself look at him, slowly and searchingly and as if she might lock the silence and the strangeness and him into her thoughts. “Alright,” she said. “How do we do this?” 

Zu turned, flattening one hand against the pillar. His fingers trailed the spines of the carved dragons. “Like this. Together.”

She pressed her hand beside his until the stone bit into her. 

“I give it to you,” he said, softly, and she felt it, the small beginnings of change in the water and in the damp grey air. “All that I am. All that I was.” 

Absurdly she found herself smiling. Gently, she said, “Because you’ve done this before and know it will work?” 

“No,” he said. His fingers curled over hers, barely there and cold. “Because I am sure of this and I am sure of you.” 

_End._


End file.
